Apologies for inactiveness | 3/10/2008 |
| Last month I started my freshmen year at the University of Technology in Delft. I signed up for Aerospace Engineering, which seems to be a quite intensive study. Therefore I didn't yet find a lot of time to post stuff on my website. I'm sure this will change in the near future, as soon as I find a good balance between my studie and other...stuff. So for this I apologize and I assure you this site will become a lot more active in the near future ! Regards, geniuz | |
Macbook: Proud Owner ! | 22/08/2008 |
| Yes people, the long awaited day is there: I finally received my brand new, bright white Apple MacBook. I must say my first impression is absolutely great. It's small, light and fast yet very easy to use. Allright lets cut the chit-chat allready and blast some stats: CPU: 2.4 Ghz Intel Core2Duo Memory: 2 GB Harddisk: 160 GB VGA: Intel GMA X1300 Screen:13.3" TFT / 1280 x 800 Unfortunately this is all I can say about it for now, didn't had the time to play around with it yet. Soon as I do, I will post a full review about it ! | |
Window Managers in a nutshell | 20/08/2008 |
| It has always been a quite populair discussion: Desktop Environments or Window Managers as some would also call them. In linux there are a LOT of flavours. KDE, Gnome, XFCE, IceWM, Fluxbox, Openbox, Blackbox, etc. etc. etc. Now it's widely known KDE and Gnome are the most "common" window managers, while being quite heavyweight. Others are less known and used, but mostly lightweight. I've spent the last couple of weeks exploring and "tuning" most of them, to be exact: XFCE, IceWM, Fluxbox, KDE and Gnome. This article is meant to make the choice for new users easier. XFCE XFCE can qualify as a Desktop Environment. It uses GTK just like Gnome. It's only lighter and faster than Gnome. On the other hand, it comes with little applications out of the box. As a file-manager you have Thunar, similar to Nautilus in Gnome. You also have a terminal emulator called Terminal. As to configuring, it's mostly GUI based so very easy. I'd like to see it as a very lightweight version of Gnome. Nice point to make, XFCE works with a compositor like Compiz. It even has it's own very stable compositor. IceWM IceWM, like Fluxbox, is very lightweight and fast. No eyecandy or out of the box apps. I can't really say I was impressed by it, I found the documentation quite poor so I had to mess around with it for quite a time before I had it reasonably configured (mostly by modifying text files). Also I found the custom themes dull and I had a hard time finding some cool ones. It is very fast though, and I believe that if you really take the time, you can make this WM work very good. Fluxbox Last real lightweight Window Manager in my list. This one is very easy to configure, there is good documentation guiding you on the homepage, so this can't really form a problem. Specially for some old hardware this WM is perfect, you can make it look cool with simple themes (there are a LOT) and it will run lightning fast with each app you launch. Fluxbox doesn't come with any apps so you have to install your favourite apps for everything. You can also make your own custom menu and you can customize basically every aspect of this WM. Fluxbox also has it's own composite manager for some eyecandy, yet I found it quite unstable thus didn't use it. KDE The first real Desktop Environment. When fully installed, you've got all you need: Konqueror and Dolphin for managing your files, Konsole as a terminal emulator, K3B for burning, Amarok for managing your music library, and much more. Compiz also works with KDE, you will just needs loads of memory as KDE itself is already heavyweight. Specially when running the most recent version, KDE 4.1, where they added a lot of new “hungry” eyecandy. As for customization, I found KDE the second best in my list, basically because the new version cut down on customization but added some user-friendlyness to it. KDE 3.5 scores a good plus though, so I would definitally recommend this for new people with some muscle in their box. Gnome Last but definitally not least, this one is my personal favourite. It's less heavy and faster than KDE, so with some moderate hardware you can get everything out of this Desktop Environment. It also comes with it's own applications like Nautilus for managing your files, Gnome-terminal as a terminal emulator, GnomeBaker for burning, Pidgin as an Instant Messenger and much more. Like XFCE most of the configuration is GUI based, so very easy and straightforward. And in my opinion it's easiest to make Gnome look very cool. You have Compiz working flawlessly and with apps like Screenlets you can create a very nice desktop with a digital clock, RSS reader, weather info, even a Pidgin dock and much more. Well, I hope this article helped some of you making a thorough choice which one suits your needs best. I didn't mention all the ones around, that would take me a lot of time, as there are a lot WM's. | |